I have been following Bitcoin for many years yet I have not been very active in the discussion boards.  Call me naive but why cannot Bitcoin have realtime difficulty adjustments to keep blocks found around 10 mins per or at least a difficulty adjustment per block created (so roughly every 10 mins the difficulty is adjusted)?

More users using Segwit transactions will be what helps drain the mempool to get the fees down.  This will take some time as exchanges change their wallets to handle segwit (as mentioned in this post previously).  In the meantime BTC should get some more hashpower as some minors switch over to mining BTC from BCH.  BCH is around 2 mins per bock so as I am writing this I see this hashrate starting to change in the next 12 hours.  BCH will have a major difficulty adjustment upward this go around.  I do not see this cycle ending between BTC and BCH for at least a few more weeks.  Well worth the wait though.  Don't panic sell.

Outdated is the key word you mentioned here.  To me BCH wants to stay the path of the outdated coin with its only key improvement of increasing block size.  I would like to see how they would ever plan to handle mass adoption.  Are we going to be talking GB blocks by then?  Bitcoin needs innovation such as lightening network to stay ahead of the game or else an altcoin will eventually take its place.  BTC is on the right path whereas BCH is just placing a bandaid on a problem that they will have to circle around to fix again and again if the team stays that path.  I think both coins can coexist but the true Bitcoin is Core err...Segwit2X...we'll have to go another round in November, but after that the future looks very bright.

I believe ZEIT will be a 100x coin or even 1000x but it will not be next.  Slow and steady growth is the philosophy as the followers and devs are not looking at this coin as a pump and dump.

I dumped all my BCH for BTC weeks ago for a lower price than it is currently trading at and I have no regrets with where BTC is headed.

I am not completely sure about the US but I will take a stab at it anyway.  If you sell your Bitcoin back into fiat, spend it on altcoin, or spend it on anything then you would pay a capital gains tax on it or take a loss depending on if you purchase something with Bitcoin at a lower Bitcoin value than when you bought it.  My suggestion would be that if you are a long term holder but want to spend bitcoin to buy Alts is that you stash your long term bitcoin holding away in a wallet to grow and just buy bitcoin on the exchange and immediately turn around and buy the alt with it not mixing it with your long term stash or you will have to pay tax on it by way of FIFO.  Sure, with the volatility of bitcoin you may have a small loss or gain by the time you buy the alt but you'll just have to try to keep track of it.  I am by no means a tax expert but I plan to consult one down the road when I want to start spending my accumulated bitcoin.  My advice is to be honest and not cheat the tax man in the US even though I don't know anyone who likes to pay taxes.

#Marscoin  You heard it here first.

For August 1st and likely long after (includes a few very speculative coins):

BTC, ETH, LTC, Stratis, Waves, GNT, Burst, Zeit.

I am watching ETC, NEO (ANS), XBY, and 1337 from the sidelines as I have a lot of research yet to do on all of those coins.

Currently I have some Zeit that is about to stake in the next 5 days so I do not believe I will be touching my wallet until after that or will it really matter if I upgrade before staking?